57 kids in seven years: Our shocking child death toll
At least 50 children have been killed since Oranga Tamariki was created – and half of them had a record with the agency before they died.
The shocking statistics have been leaked to Stuff by someone close to the children’s ministry.
The reality is that the 57 dead children killed by whanau since Oranga Tamariki took over is a perfectly acceptable price to pay for most NZers to underfund our social services!
Our underfunded social services that prefer to contract out wrap around services to NGOs are a weeping wound that burns our society but we point blank refuse to fund them properly by taxing the rich!
Oranga Tamariki is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
The argument is that children from backgrounds with specific features were the worst in terms of cost to the state, so if the State stepped in and removed the children quickly enough, that cost will fall.To do this they passed law reducing the legal rights of parents, streamlined their 0800 numbers and weaponised uplifts.
They also ensured that people with children taken from them are ineligible for legal aid so they couldn’t fight back legally.
Oranga Tamariki has always been about saving the State money and the welfare of the child is secondary to that!
Since the Royal Inquiry into Historic Abuse, the Public Services Commission has done all it can to remove OT oversight and roll it into the ERO so that it saves the State money if children are abused in our care.
That Labour acquiesced to this and removed the Children’s Commissioner from providing OT oversight is disgraceful.
MSD in the 2000s oversaw obscene tactics that included hiring private detectives to dig dirt on victims who were complaining about being abused in state care in a Test case that if MSD had lost would have cost the State untold in damages.
The elite Wellington Bureaucratic class wanted to remove the threat of costs and damages from poorly funded social services and the ‘social investment model’ is a means to spend money on the most costliest of those social problems without actually universally funding services.
For the State, amputating social responsibilities and the legal threat of damages frees them up from having to spend any money in the first place.
Rather than creating more taxes like a Capital Gains Tax or Financial Transaction Tax to properly funded the welfare of children in State care, it’s easier to amputate the responsibility altogether.
Social Investment is a bullshit term for ending universal provision of welfare under the guise of providing more resource for the most at risk target demographic.
Children die in care because the adults in their lives are broken violent people living at the bottom of a system that only seeks to erase them as a cost, not heal them as human beings.
Is barely enough enough?
The game being played now is to con your stupid sleepy hobbits into privatisation using ‘social investment’.
The stupid sleepy hobbits of NZ are dumb enough to be tricked because we are already working so hard to ignore the deaths in care right now.
We scream ‘something must be done’, but refuse to do the one thing that will do that, which is tax the rich so that our social infrastructure can be funded properly to stop this feral abuse in the underclass!
Beware every prick wanting to use another dead brown baby from the underclass as a point scoring exercise to demand ‘enough is enough’ because we refuse point blank to do the thing that need to be done!
Tax! The! Rich!
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I think the country has this as a blemish to discuss – well done Martyn.
For a long time this and suicide have been ignored and both are a horror to NZ’s society.
Didn’t Sue Bradford promote the anti smacking legislation so that these problems would end. Typical lefty dreams pretending the government can solve all societal problems ie child poverty.
Tom C It was the National government which strove officiously to create a low wage economy and to keep people in poverty. That’s why slippery Bill English advised against employing Kiwi guys and importing easily exploitable Indians instead.
Bradford’s anti- child violence bill was opposed by the right, who moaned and groaned and wrote that parents have the right to do whatever they like to their children, and some of them, like that awful woman from Nelson, have never shut up about it.
What an appalling response. Sue Bradford’s bill was to stop children being hit that is what it was about. Dpn’t you think that is a good thing. If anyone sees anyone hitting a child they can report them, that is a good thing. Kids should not be hit at anytime. Teaching them that violence is the answer is hardly helpful.
No one thought this was going to stop ALL violence on children.
If people had jobs proper jobs decently paid they would have respect not only for themselves but for others as well they would feel part of their community – poverty is clearly not the only issue, being loved and care for as a child means as a parent you are far far less likely to behave badly with your own children.
That’s fucked.
Tom read the article. Typical righties believing they weren’t responsible, Applewood explains it perfectly. But typical of your retard rightie beliefs, the left are to blame!
+100
No Tom, the main reason for Sue Bradfords legislation was to give children rights as victims. Prior to the legislation being introduced people could kick the shit out of their kids, hospitalizing them, and yes, even killing them, and for “over-disciplining”, the parents would be given a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again. Now they go to jail. You would think that righties would be happy with that, but no.
When rents in small towns for run down ex state houses or dirty old keith hays are at $400/week. is it surprising that families fail?
When ‘investors’ are allowed to accumulate ‘portfolios’ of many, many of these type of houses and channel rental income through trusts and partnerships imbalance results.
When legitimate charities are forced to the wall whilst the plethora of ‘new age’ religious exemptions from taxation drive up prices like a supermarket duopoly on steroids, the ongoing effects are deleterious to all.
English is a classic example of why short men should never be allowed anywhere near politics. Ditto fat ladies.
There are those who will look just short, by not measuring up all that well, like the Minister for Children.
The price we pay for baby farming for benefits –
The very fact that such a damning statistic had to be leaked should tell you that funding is the least of this organisations problems.
Note the puntative court cases where blood and soil trump the work of long term committed carers. When was the last time that someone from this rats arse of department was accountable for anything, ever?
Say what you will about the right, but in this case they cannot do a worse job than those fucking muppets in Labour. The whole shameful edifice should be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
And yes, if the fucking government goon squad wasn’t standing in the way my wife and I would be fostering but as things stand we wouldn’t touch this shit heap with a ten foot pole.
Amazing after 6 years of Labour in control it is still Nationals Bill English that us to blame fir this terrible outcome for 56 children . Voters do not have a say in how money is spent by our political masters but the obvious bloated waste at OT in tye last 6 years shows that those in control were not competent.
A little bit of trivia for Trevor. This atrocity was started by English, what an incompetent decision by English.
A fire doesn’t start without a spark.
Labour had 6 years to make changes so the voters decided they could not wait any longer for Sepaloni to take action.At some stage some of those on this blog will have to except you lost the country won.(I hope )
Wow you lost the country won, you sound like a 5 year old Trevor, you truly do.
This monstrosity is on English, accept it.
Trevor. They need to do complete audit of Oranga Tamariki’s expenditure, preferably by the auditor general, not the State Services Commission. Things like compulsory sleepovers on marae for clerical and admin staff not directly interacting with clients, is doubtless paralleled in other government departments, but in this case, it is children’s well-being at stake, or children’s lives at stake, and every dollar spent being PC could be spent much more fruitfully. They need a decent Minister for Children, and in spite of all the bottom warmers up in Bowen Street, it looks as if the kids lucked out there too.
Others mention accountability. It is a fundament flaw in the democratic process, that a Minister, like the Minister for Children cannot be called to explain himself. He was able to wrongly tell all the Parliamentary Opposition that their ancestors were land thieves, write crappy poetry, and chide another Maori MP for being vanilla, but he went along with kneecapping the Commissioner for Children, and even colluded with Mallard’s noise and water torture by night during the parliamentary protest, when none of them, not one, showed any concern whatsoever for kiddies who shouldn’t have even been there, being bullied by our elected representative who were hiding in the Beehive like the craven gutless cowards that they are.
Nine or ten dear little children came trick or treating tonight, and it is incredibly sad that they might just as well have been ghosts of the children who this country is killing in such terrible numbers, and politicians who are not outraged by this, and apologising for this, and publicly determining to up their game, must be punished by we, the voters.
While I agree with increased tax income to fund better public services I doubt that it would make any difference to protecting young children. Society has the everyone does what appears right to them attitude and the result is no better than when the phrase is used in the book Judges. While having the freedom to choose is vital there needs to be accepted limits otherwise chaos will be the result.
It is truly fascinating that people believe killing children is a political problem and not a spiritual one.
Tabatha. It is a moral issue, and of course a legal issue, but the public servants paid to act on behalf of our children, politicise these issues themselves, that’s their modus operandi. Obviously there are good and dedicated social workers doing the hard yards, but they aren’t calling the shots.
Taxing the rich is a solution, a band aid for a problem. But what isn’t underfunded and ripe for privatization now days? Taxing the (super) rich less, under funding/undermining public services so that they may end up on the privatization chopping block, that then turns into new revenue streams for the under-taxed super rich, this is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a tool created by the billionaire class and implemented and managed by their political minions. This is the real problem here – the hold, the influence that money has over politics. And we stupid sleepy hobbits of NZ ditto the world, we are not sleepy, we are not ignorant on purpose – the billionaire-class mainstream media machine helps keep us this way – because after all, if the world actually new that the politicians were serving big money interests over our own, then I reckon the world wouldn’t be the shyt world we are currently living in with forecasts for it to get even worse…..
Seems that murder victims are now just “In the wrong place at the wrong time”:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/133211682/victim-repeatedly-stabbed-in-his-sleeping-bag-at-remote-campground
The crown prosecutor dropped this clanger when describing a tourist killed while enjoying a camping trip in New Zealand’s great outdoors. More alarmingly, the murder accused was described in court by his mentor as a ‘good kid’. This is what the public is up against.
These legal ghouls now suggesting no public space is safe, at any time. To hell with respect for others, the sanctity of life, human rights, and the rule of law, because some pissy kid couldn’t get his way and decided to murder someone to go on a joyride. When and where is the right time and place to go outside? Is this the end of New Zealand’s tourism then, the safe NZ dream is over? Is it time for the public to push back against these violent thugs to make our communities the right place? Were the murdered Palestinian kids or the 57 kids mentioned above in the wrong place at the wrong time?
These delusional and dangerous state guardians who see murderers (that they should have been supervising at all times) as just a bit wayward. These people should be prosecuted for negligence resulting from loss of life. They should have someone supervising them, at all times. Have the whole state service under surveillance for that matter, these creepers can’t be trusted.
And these juvenile scumbags, who have no trouble ending someone’s life just to steal their car. They have about as much moral integrity as our politicians and elected leaders come to think of it.
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